Context: Solving the space junk problem In any conceptual domain (such as future configurations of Near Earth Orbit) where there are many degrees of lliteral-spatial, commercial, strategic or technological freedom beyond the most overt saliences of interest – the over-population mentioned in the abstract – we will probably find that ambiguities and unknowns will be […]
Context: Strong Yet Brittle: The Risks of Digital Authoritarianism There are quite probable logical and (by extension, mathematical and) distributed material or socioeconomic, not to mention strategic, senses in which a strict adherence to unwavering and inflexible closure and continuity must necessarily create the conditions of inevitable, eventual and/or accelerated structural disassembly or decline. A […]
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Twitter Tests Tall Tales
Context: Trump threatens social media after Twitter puts warning on his false claims The dissonant entropy of salient adversarialism finds optimal self-replication through staccato bursts of semi-coherent linguistic superficiality and Twitter is a weapon of choice. If the primary medium of transmission could even plausibly be extinguished, an entire operating model and communications strategy (such […]
We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence. If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation. We appear to be attempting to […]
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Infinitely Random Encryption Seeds
Context: The Puzzling Search for Perfect Randomness I can never resist a good speculative and completely “out there” waffle. Randomness is non-trivially significant in cryptography. The closer the approximation of a numerical sequence or the properties of an abstract geometrical object to randomness, the more difficult the encryption seed derived from it is to crack. […]
Context: Pandemic Makes Evident ‘Grotesque’ Gender Inequality In Household Work No surprise, then, that undergoing traumatic paroxysms of existential stress in this pandemic has caused all those unacknowledged (and yet – hardly unknown) faultlines and inequitable socioeconomic discontinuities to percolate into awareness; cultural artefacts like some neurotic’s once poorly-masked behavioural anachronisms, endlessly and problematically oscillating […]
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Strategic Blindspots
Context: Colouring Russian views of conflict in the 21st century Positing strategic culture, as are all cultures, as a semantic overlay or usefully-reductive functional self-representation (if even as that which exists unacknowledged or notionally unconscious) of any state is compelling and undoubtedly carries some gravity but such articulate eloquence often masks a fatal analytical flaw. […]
Context: Truth Beyond Logic and Time Beyond Clocks: Janna Levin on the Vienna Circle and How Mathematician Kurt Gödel Shaped the Modern Mind Gödel is interesting in many ways. While acknowledging that his logical and mathematical foundation-shaking Incompleteness proofs have a very specific context and meaning, the extent to which a broader reading (and thinking) […]
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No Limits
Is it really so? Is ICT or any other language and hyper-extended (or reflexive) cognition really the limit of our world? That would surely to be to assume that that world – any world – was in some aspirational sense bounded, complete, even if only by, in or of itself; but the language, the grammar […]
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Logical Meaning
If all of life, all of matter, energy and the autonomously self-propagating, soliton-like and computational shock or compression wave of sentience and intelligence is to mean anything at all, it is in the glorious ambiguity of semantics and degrees of freedom by and through which we bootstrap ourselves back up into that world of logical […]
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Cyber: Hidden Patterns
Consider the many ways that the cyber arms-race is precisely this – a procedurally-incremental measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. The hyper-inflating combinatorial possibility space of attack and defence as a gestalt creates it’s own momentum and self-propagating, patterned structure(s) and open or extensible system(s). The evolutionary nature of this process is inescapable. Each act of interdiction then […]
Or: Why The Enlightenment Inevitably Consumed Itself Each new system of thought, each extension, each insight, each historical inflection-point and distributed, systemic phase transition or levelling-up of human civilisation and each new branching of the tree of combinatorial (human) possibility – it opens the degrees of freedom, of motion, of growth and – simultaneously – […]
